Matthew Banks
Dr. Matthew I. Banks received his BSE and MSE from Johns Hopkins University and Doctorate of Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Banks is currently Professor of Anesthesiology and Affiliate Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, WI. Dr. Banks’ research interests include mechanisms of loss and recovery of consciousness under anesthesia, the overlap of these mechanisms with changes in arousal during natural sleep, the link between inflammation and brain function during delirium, and the mechanisms whereby psychedelics ameliorate psychiatric disorders.
Jonathan Birch
Professor Jonathan Birch is PI on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He leads a multidisciplinary team that aims to develop better methods for studying the subjective experiences of animals scientifically, while at the same time putting the emerging science of animal sentience to work to design better policies, laws and ways of caring for animals. His team's 2021 review of the evidence of sentience in cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans for the UK government led to the protection of these animals under the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.
Hal Blumenfeld
Hal Blumenfeld is a neuroscientist and neurologist at Yale School of Medicine. He studies subcortical and cortical mechanisms of normal consciousness, impaired consciousness in epilepsy, and restoring consciousness with neurostimulation. His lab recently found that normal conscious perception of visual stimuli involves large-scale cortical and subcortical networks independent of task report and eye movements. The same networks are affected by transient disorders of consciousness such as temporal lobe seizures, where network inhibition of subcortical arousal plays a key role. These concepts have led to a clinical trial, stimulating the intralaminar thalamus to restore arousal and consciousness in temporal lobe seizures.
Emery Brown
Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT and the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose research is defining the neuroscience of how anesthetics produce states of general anesthesia. He also develops statistical methods for neuroscience data analysis. Brown is a member of the National Academies of Medicine, Sciences, Engineering, and Inventors. He is the recipient of an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, and the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience.
Marisa Carrasco
Marisa Carrasco (Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, Collegiate Professor, New York University) uses psychophysics, neuroimaging and neurostimulation to investigate how attention shapes visual perception and alters appearance. She has chaired the NYU Psychology Department, served as senior editor of Vision Research and Journal of Vision, and been president of the Vision Sciences Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Her awards include NSF Young Investigator, AAUW, Guggenheim, Cattell, Vision Sciences Society’s Davida Teller, and CMU Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kalina Christoff
Kalina Christoff is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Her work examines the neural mechanisms of human thought, from daydreaming and mind-wandering to creative thinking and goal-directed reasoning. She also studies introspection, meta-cognition, mindfulness, psychedelics, and self-agency. The Dynamic Framework of Thought (DFT), introduced by Dr. Christoff and colleagues in 2016, links different qualities in the stream of consciousness to the dynamic interactions across large-scale brain networks, including the executive, default, and salience networks. The DFT highlights the origins of spontaneous thought in the form of precursor processes in medial temporal lobe structures that precede conscious awareness by several seconds.
Michael Cohen
Michael Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Amherst College and a Research Scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. His research focuses on asking questions like: How much of the world are observers aware of at any given moment? What are the limits of human perception? Why is some information encoded and remembered while other information goes unnoticed and is forgotten? What neural processes are critical for conscious processing? To answer these questions, he uses a combination of psychophysics, virtual reality, neuroimaging, and computational modeling.
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He has made seminal contributions to the biology of decision-making, affect, and consciousness, and published over 400 scientific articles and five single-author books. His most recent titles on the topic of consciousness are “Sensing is a far cry from sentience”, Animal Sentience 33(16), DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1805, 2023; and “Feelings are the Source of Consciousness”, Neural Computation, Vol. 35;3, 2023.
Hanna Damasio
Hanna Damasio is Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Neurology, and Director, Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She has published over 280 scientific articles and is the author of the award-winning book Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology, and of Human Brain Anatomy in Computerized Images, now in its second edition. Recent publications on the topic of consciousness include “Homeostatic Feelings and the Biology of Consciousness”, BRAIN, Oxford Academic, Vol. 145; 2231-2235, 2022; “Feelings are the Source of Consciousness”, Neural Computation, Vol. 35:3, 2023; and “Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking”, IAI News. /articles/consciousness-begins-with-feelings-hanna-damasio-auid-2462, May 2023.
Lila Davachi
TBA
Stanislas Dehaene
TBA
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a pediatrician and research director at the CNRS. She studies the development of cognitive functions in children using non-invasive brain imaging techniques. She aims to understand the relationship between brain architecture and cognitive operations in the immature brain. During her clinical work in the 1980s in neonatal wards, the question of the origin of consciousness, particularly as it relates to the perception of pain and other sensory stimuli, was a critical aspect of providing appropriate care. To address this issue in preverbal infants, she developed experimental paradigms using primarily EEG. She showed that the neural signatures of conscious access in adults are observed in preverbal infants.
Karl Deisseroth
Deisseroth is Professor of Bioengineering and Psychiatry at Stanford, and an HHMI Investigator. Deisseroth received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1992, his PhD from Stanford in 1998, and his MD from Stanford in 2000. Deisseroth then completed his medical internship and psychiatry residency at Stanford, and is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He continues as a psychiatrist at Stanford specializing in affective and autism-spectrum disorders, employing medications and neural stimulation. For developing optogenetics, and for discovering the structures and mechanisms of natural light-gated ion channels, Deisseroth has received the 2010 Nakasone Prize, 2012 Perl Prize, 2013 Lounsbery Prize, 2013 Gabbay Prize, 2013 BRAIN Prize, 2014 Dickson Prize in Science, 2014 Keio Prize, 2015 Breakthrough Prize, 2015 Lurie Prize, 2015 Albany Prize, 2015 Dickson Prize in Medicine, 2016 BBVA Award, 2017 Massry Prize, 2017 Fresenius Prize, 2018 Gairdner Award, 2018 Kyoto Prize, 2020 Heineken Prize, 2021 Lasker Award, 2022 Horwitz Prize, and 2023 Japan Prize. Deisseroth was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010, National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and National Academy of Engineering in 2019.
Joseph Fins
Joseph J. Fins, M.D., M.A.C.P., F.R.C.P. is The E. William Davis, Jr. M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He co-directs the Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury at Weill Cornell and Rockefeller University. At Yale Law School he is the Solomon Center Distinguished Scholar in Medicine, Bioethics and the Law and a Visiting Professor. The author of Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics and the Struggle for Consciousness, Fins has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal National Academy of Medicine of Spain.
Itzhak Fried
Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD. is Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles and at Tel-Aviv University. He is the Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program and member of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and member of the Israeli Academy of Science. Dr. Fried’s research centers on the basic mechanisms and neuromodulation of brain networks using single neuron recordings and stimulation in humans. This provides a unique opportunity to study at the single neuron level the content of consciousness and its emergence in subjects who can declare their memories and wishes.
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Peter Godfrey-Smith is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He taught prevoiusly at Stanford, Harvard, ANU, and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of six books, including Other Minds, Metazoa, and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. He has also written articles about the evolution of the mind, and has done field work on octopus behavior in Australia. He gave the Jean Nicod Prize lectures in 2022 and the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard in 2023.
Patrick Haggard
Patrick Haggard leads the Action and Body research group at Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. He has researched voluntary action, conscious intention and sense of agency for over 25 years. He has developed new methods for studying the sense of agency, and applied these in experimental studies with volunteers and different groups of neuropsychiatric patients. He has also worked extensively on the neural and conscious precursors of voluntary action, and on the phenomenology of conscious intention.
Biyu J. He
Biyu J. He is an Assistant Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience & Physiology, and Radiology at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Her laboratory uses a combination of multimodal human brain imaging and computational approaches to study the neural mechanisms of conscious and unconscious processing in the human brain, with a focus on conscious visual perception. Her work has revealed an intricate coordination between subcortical brain systems and large-scale brain networks in supporting conscious vision, and the important roles that memories and spontaneous brain activity play in shaping conscious perception.
Syd Johnson
L. Syd M Johnson, PhD is a philosopher/bioethicist/neuroethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University, and an ethics consultant at Upstate’s hospitals. She’s an Associate Editor for Neuroethics, and a member of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group. Dr. Johnson’s books include The Ethics of Uncertainty: Entangled Ethical and Epistemic Risks in Disorders of Consciousness and Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals. Her research focuses on animal ethics, research ethics, and brain injuries, including brain death and disorders of consciousness. Her interest in all things with brains includes every kind of critter, zombies, and robots.
Christof Koch
Christof Koch, PhD, is a neuroscientist best known for his studies and writings exploring the basis of consciousness, starting with the molecular biologist Francis Crick. Trained as a physicist, Christof was for 27 years a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology. In 2011, he joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle as their Chief Scientist, becoming the President in 2015. He is now Meritorious Investigator at the Allen Institute and the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, with its focus on understanding consciousness, and how this knowledge can benefit humanity.
Gabriel Kreiman
Gabriel Kreiman is a Professor at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. His lab combines computational models, neurophysiological recordings, and behavioral experiments to decipher the mechanisms orchestrating cognition. The Kreiman lab has contributed to our understanding of vision, memory and the development of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence algorithms.
Joseph LeDoux
Joseph LeDoux is a University Professor and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, where he also directs the Emotional Brain Institute. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion, memory, and consciousness. LeDoux, has received a number of awards for his research and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. LeDoux is the author of several books, including The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious (2016 APA William James Book Award), The Deep History of Ourselves, and The Four Realms of Existence (October, 2023).
Marcello Massimini
Marcello Massimini, was trained as a Medical Doctor, received a PhD in Neurophysiology and is currently Professor of Physiology at the University of Milan and fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. Spanning from in vivo intracellular recordings to neuroimaging, EEG and TMS-EEG in humans, his whole research activity has been devoted to understanding the consequences of brain injury and what changes in cortical circuits when consciousness fades and recovers. On these subjects he has published papers in high impact journals (Science, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Neuron, Brain) and a book (“Sizing up Consciousness”) for Oxford University Press.
Sima Mofakham
As a physicist, Sima Mofakham had always found herself captivated by complex systems and the brain. She received a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience at the University of Michigan. As a postdoc at NYU, she modeled how the thalamus shapes neuronal ensembles encoding behavior. In 2018, she started working at Stony Brook and built a lab with Dr. Chuck Mikell (neurosurgeon) to study the recovery of consciousness (RoC) after TBI. They pioneered depth cortical recordings and a novel measure of consciousness to assess the level of consciousness in real time. They aim to develop novel neuromodulatory approaches to facilitate RoC.
Eric Oermann
Eric Karl Oermann is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Radiology, and Data Science at NYU. He studied mathematics at Georgetown and philosophy with the President’s Council on Bioethics and abandoned graduate studies in group theory to pursue Neurosurgery. Dr. Oermann completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Verily Life Sciences, and served as an advisor at Google-X on Project Amber. He has published over one-hundred manuscripts spanning machine learning, neurosurgery, and philosophy in journals ranging from The American Journal of Bioethics to Nature. He was one of Forbes Magazine’s 30-Under-30, and has co-founded three startups.
Theofanis Panagiotaropoulos
Theofanis I. Panagiotaropoulos is a Research Director at Inserm-CEA in France. He is using multielectrode, high-density recordings to probe the neural mechanisms of consciousness in the non-human primate brain. His work has shown that conscious content representations can be decoded from neuronal ensemble recordings in the prefrontal cortex during no-report paradigms of visual consciousness. These representations gain access to conscious awareness depending on prefrontal cortex state fluctuations that act as a gate for sensory input. His most recent work involves the investigation of abstract processing from neuronal populations in the prefrontal cortex and concept cells in the human medial temporal lobe.
Josef Parvizi
Josef Parvizi, MD, Ph.D., is a professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and practices as a physician-scientist treating patients with epilepsy and leading the Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford University. He has been at Stanford for about 16 years, specializing in a multi-modal approach, combining direct recordings from the surface and depth of the human brain with direct electrical stimulation of the brain. Parvizi’s contribution to the field of consciousness can be summarized in "Subjectivity" and "Causality." Detailed subjective reports are combined with rigorous intracranial recordings, cross-subject anatomical validations, and large-scale brain-wide mappings with imaging and electrophysiological means. The combination of subjectivity and causality coming from Parvizi’s lab provides a unique and refreshing opportunity in studies of human consciousness.
Elizabeth Phelps
TBA
Bradley Postle
Professor of Psychology and Psychology, U. Wisconsin–Madison. Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Empirical contributions to consciousness research stem primarily from work on prioritization in human working memory, which has included "activity-silent" working memory and transformations of representational geometries. (Also oversaw Jason Samaha's dissertation research on the role of oscillatory dynamics in perceptual awareness.) Scholarly/pedagogical contributions stem from the experience of working with patient H.M. while training in the laboratory of Suzanne Corkin.
Maureen Ritchey
Maureen Ritchey is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Boston College. Her research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory— in particular, how brain regions work together to encode and retrieve event details and how these processes are shaped by the salience and specificity of memory. She has argued that episodic memory can be understood as a series of network interactions, which transform retrieved associations into the subjective experience of recollection. Her research is currently supported by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and an R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Philippe Rochat
Philippe Rochat was trained in Piaget’s school, currently Professor of Psychology at Emory University and Director of the Emory Infant and Child Laboratory. An invited professor at various universities in France, Brazil and Denmark, he is a 2006–2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2014–2015 Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris, France. Aside from many empirical papers on the early development of self-awareness, social cognition and morality in children across cultures, he published 5 books, most recently Moral Acrobatics: How we avoid ethical ambiguity by thinking in black and white (2021, Oxford U Press) and Finitude: The psychology of self and time (2022, Routledge).
Yuri Saalmann
Yuri Saalmann is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chair of the Neurobiology Major, and Core Scientist at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. He received his PhD from the Australian National University and postdoc’ed at Royal Holloway University of London and Princeton University. The Saalmann lab has demonstrated layer-specific cortico-thalamic correlates of consciousness and bidirectional control of consciousness using thalamic stimulation. To do this, the lab combines intracranial neural recordings, imaging and deep brain stimulation in non-human primates and human subjects.
Daniel Schacter
Daniel L. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Schacter’s early research explored the distinction between explicit (i.e., conscious) and implicit (i.e., nonconscious) forms of memory, and more recently has examined the nature of memory distortions and how individuals use memory to imagine future and other hypothetical events, resulting in over 400 peer-reviewed publications. Schacter has also authored several books, including Searching for Memory and The Sevens Sins of Memory. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and received various awards, including most recently the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
Jon Simons
Jon Simons is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a research programme seeking to understand the cognitive and brain mechanisms of human memory. Jon did his PhD at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge before post-docs at Harvard University and University College London. In recent years, his research has included a focus on the subjective conscious experience of remembering, and how it allows us to reflect on the content of our memories, helping us make sense of the events we experience and the thoughts, feelings, and imaginations that accompany them.
David Soto
David received his PhD in Experimental Psychology (2004) from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He then moved to the UK to work at the Behavioural Brain Sciences Center at the University of Birmingham. In 2008, he set up his laboratory at Imperial College London where he was an Associate Professor until 2016 when he returned to Spain. David’s work has focused on understanding the distinction between conscious and non-conscious processes during perceptual selection, learning and memory, and metacognition, using a wide range of behavioural, neuroimaging and computational methods.
Giulio Tononi
Giulio Tononi is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he holds chairs in sleep medicine and consciousness science. His scientific work on consciousness has centered on the development of the integrated information theory, a comprehensive theory of what consciousness is, its neural substrate, what determines its quantity and quality, and how it can be measured independent of report. The theory accounts for why certain brain areas are critical for consciousness, and has led to the development of information integration measures for assessing the quantity of consciousness in healthy humans and, by extrapolation, in unresponsive patients.